Braden Stewart:Create and Destroy

Fri. December 13th 2013 - Fri. January 31st 2014

@ Decade sculpture window 1407 Government st.

all hours

These boxes were built to model a public mailbox or electrical box: a common harvesting ground for tags and other forms of graffiti. They were left in my studio space, and over the course of 2 weeks myself and a few artists’ covered the boxes with tags, characters and fully legalized ‘graffiti’. With the constant layering of paint, ink, stencils and colour the boxes took on an expressive life of their own.

Coming to the end of 2 weeks I brought the boxes outside, into a public setting and staged them as if they were there the whole time. This was an effort to create a completely fictional documentation, suggesting that the boxes were created illegally. This aims to challenge the relationship between documentation and physical evidence.

After photographing the boxes they were ‘buffed’ over with multiple shades of grey, destroying any physical evidence of the art work. The photos taken have since been uploaded to a public webpage, there are two ways to access the images:

This work is an effort to explore the current state of graffiti and street art culture. Since the invention of Instagram (mobile app), artists from around the world are constantly documenting work to be shared publicly. This has changed the context of the work from being a public discovery to a digital image you discover on the internet. I aim to challenge and question the boundaries of the current, commercialized state of graffiti as an art form.